Black Friday fever is engulfing the US, but it looks like the pre-Christmas shopping bonanza, which falls on November 25, is going to be just another Friday for brick-and-mortar retailers in the UAE, according to industry experts.
Retailers here say they are not rolling out discounts for Black Friday.
“In the UAE, it is not yet popular in the brick-and-motor formats and is more an activity in the online virtual space,” said Kamal Vachani, director of Al Maya Group, a supermarket chain in the UAE.
Nikola Kosutic, research manager at global consultancy Euromonitor International, agreed: “In the UAE, it is purely an online event.”
In the US, however, merchants are gearing up for the annual pre-Christmas scrum.
JCPenny, Kohl’s and Macy’s are offering price cuts of more than 50 per cent on apparel and accessories this Friday.
Nearly 79 per cent of Americans surveyed in a recent study by consultancy Deloitte plan to shop on Black Friday, spending $400 between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, a major online shopping day which falls on November 28.
“Black Friday is a US phenomenon... it’s a way to estimate how the sales might be for the Christmas season in the North American market,” said David Macadam, chief executive and vice-chairman of the Middle East Council of Shopping Centres in Dubai.
The bonanza discount day “doesn’t have the same level of importance, interest or legitimacy for this market” because shoppers in this region are not “as focused on Christmas sales as they are in the West,” he said.
In this region, Eid sales are a better indicator of the retail market’s strength.
“Eid is an important time in this region to measure sales because it’s a barometer of the well-being of people and how they feel things are going,” Macadam said.
The National Retail Federation, a US-based industry trade group, expects a 3.6 per cent increase in holiday sales to $655.8 billion this year.
